To the Lighthouse, XIX through end

As much as I enjoyed reading To the Lighthouse, I feel like there is no way I could actually appreciate the enormity of Woolf's creation without close reading every page. However, here's my first few stabs at an interpretation.

While marriage itself is not the focus of the novel, it certainly addresses the idea of happiness. I found Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay's marriage to be an interesting characterization of what realistic happiness looks like. Initially (as mentioned in my last post), their marriage seems a little strange, due to the Oedipal dynamics with the son James. The extent to which Lily idealizes the Ramsays makes the reader think that their marriage is in reality far from perfect.  However, as the book progresses, this image shifts. In one scene, "Their eyes met for a second; but they did not want to speak to each other. They had nothing to say, but something seemed, nevertheless, to go from him to her. It was the life, it was the power of it, it was the tremendous humour, she knew" (119). The extent of their closeness here, and the fact that they reach such a mutual understanding, "life" and "humour" without even communicating is testimony to the strength of their relationship, and seems to represent an ideal, yet realistic equilibrium that amounts to happiness. At the end of the same scene, Mrs. Ramsay says "'yes, you were right. It's going to be wet tomorrow. You won't be able to go.' And she looked at him smiling. For she had triumphed again. She had not said it: he knew" (124). All Mrs. Ramsay has to do for her husband to know that she loves him is to concede to him on this one little thing (though since this little thing is about the lighthouse, it's obviously not trivial). Both Mr and Mrs. Ramsay are obstinate, but in this way they reach a coexistence, an understanding about how their love works that accommodates both of their dispositions.

Beyond marriage, Woolf addresses other paths to happiness or understanding, specifically art and intellect. Mr. Ramsay, the intellectual, presents one route. However, the effectiveness of intellect to confer happiness is contested. Lily observes that "But now he had nobody to talk to about that table, or his boots, or his devour, and his face had that touch of desperation" (156). The "table" mentioned refers back to his philosophical studies (also mentioned in my first post), but this philosophizing is depicted as lonely: being too deeply buried in ideas that no one else can understand leads only to "desperation." In contrast to Mr. Ramsay, who is "good" at what he does (thinking), there is Lily, who is bad at painting. However, the ending of the novel suggests that art, whether good or bad, more likely leads to true understanding and happiness than does even the highest form of intellect. The last lines of the novel read: 

"With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision" (209). After the entire novel filled with constantly shifting images, mingled perspectives, and the intangibility of the lighthouse, Lily is the only character who "saw it clear," is able to feel like something is "finished," who has a "vision." The fact that this vision occurs through painting badly emphasizes the power of art over intellect, of passion over skill, in facilitating illumination of the world and resolution in one's life. 

Mr. Ramsay is also used to illustrate and discuss misogyny and identity. Though he manages to have this "perfect" understanding with Mrs. Ramsay, he fails to understand other women. When he watches Lily paint, "Why, thought Mr. Ramsay, should she look at the sea when I am here?" (151). This represents a lack of understanding on two levels: he cannot fathom why a woman would not be focused primarily on a man, and it does not occur to him that Lily's gaze on the sea is unrelated to his presence, is rather caused by other more complex thoughts and deliberations. This relative cluelessness implies that male ideas about women are selfish and incomplete, and do not do justice to the complexity of female minds. Later on,  "He thought, women are always like that; the vagueness of their minds is hopeless; it was a thing he had never been able to understand; but so it was" (167). This more explicitly draws attention to Mr. Ramsay's inability to "understand" women, but the use of "hopeless" and "never" here also illustrate that he has made no attempts to do so. He complains of the "vagueness of their minds," again exemplifying the misogynistic idea that women are intellectually inferior. The fact that Mr. Ramsay eventually fails to attain the "vision" that Lily does essentially negates his approach to happiness and his world view, including his misogynistic tendencies. And of course, the fact that Woolf herself (a woman) wrote this incredibly intricate intellectual masterpiece in itself defends women against any accusations of cognitive inferiority. 

Random, particularly beautiful quote:
"only the Lighthouse beam entered the rooms for a moment, sent its sudden stare over bed and wall in the darkness of winter, looked with equanimity at the thistle and the swallow, the rat and the straw" (138).

To the Lighthouse, I through XVIII

It is impossible to talk about To the Lighthouse without examining its style and tone, particularly Woolf's use of stream of consciousness. While Austen and Dostoevsky use free indirect discourse to offer insight into the psyche of characters while still maintaining some narrative distance, Woolf degrades the barrier between narrator and character one level further. Rather than being "pulled" towards characters, Woolf's narrator actually moves in and out of their minds, meaning that to some extent, there is no true narrative voice, only an amalgamation of the characters' observations and thoughts. An interesting example of this is Mrs. Ramsay's stream of thoughts while she is measuring the stocking against James' leg, "Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, half-way down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waters swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad" (28). Here, the observation, "never did anybody look so sad" is filtered through Mrs. Ramsay's consciousness. Her imagination of the situation, "perhaps a tear formed" overlays the physical image, and the imagery of "darkness" and "waters" are a product of her own perspective rather than an explicit narrative choice. While it's a bit difficult to read this style, it offers less biased insight into characters than free indirect discourse, and in my opinion, a more intense depiction of their consciousness than simple interior monologue.
Because Woolf meanders in and out of each character's mind, it is interesting to observe the characters (often opposing) views of each other. For instance, Lily contemplates, "for that was true of Mrs. Ramsay- she pitied men always as if they lacked something- women never, as if they had something" (85), but Mrs. Ramsay in some way exhibits pity for Lily: "There was in Lily a thread of something; a flare of something; something of her own which Mrs. Ramsay liked very much indeed, but no man would, she feared" (104). These opposing depictions and perceptions primarily serve to elucidate both the characters' way of seeing the world and the way they present themselves. However, it seems to me that these confusions of perception also illustrate the inevitable failures of human communication, and the inability for any one individual to actually understand another (as the narrator manages to do). Both of these quotes relate also to the discussion of gender roles that permeates Woolf's work. Mrs. Ramsay's apparent lack of pity for other women suggests that misogyny and oppression of women does not only stem from men, but rather has been engrained in society to the extent that women themselves facilitate it. This is somewhat refuted when we see that Mrs. Ramsay does actually feel positive and sympathetic emotion towards Lily, however, this pity centers around the fact that "no man would [like her]." The pity is not for Lily herself, but rather for her fate in a world where marriage is of utmost importance. This emphasizes the difficulty of constructing, pitying, or maintaining the female identity in the absence of men and marriage- a problem which Woolf treats as lamentable.
Woolf also uses male characters' misperceptions about women to call attention to the flaws of misogyny. Mr. Tansley observes, "They did nothing but talk, talk, talk, eat, eat, eat. It was the women's fault. Women made civilization impossible with all their 'charm,' all their silliness" (85). Tansley believes that intellect is the cornerstone of civilization, and while this idea is not refuted, his idea that talking, eating, and "charm" are actually antithetical to civilization seems vaguely absurd. Even the root of the word "civilization" contains "civil," which implies a focus on social conduct, the things which women embody and Tansley abhors. Woolf thus uses Tansley's complaint about women to refute this particular source of misogyny. Later on, when Paul, Andrew, Minta, and Nancy are by the shore, Minta "had no control over her emotions, Andrew thought. Women hadn't. The wretched Paul had to pacify her. The men (Andrew and Paul at once became manly, and different from usual) took counsel briefly" (77). Here, another complaint about females is presented: excess emotion. However, the fact that Andrew and Paul had to "become manly, and different from usual" in order to pull Minta out of this emotion implies that in fact men naturally have this "excess" emotion as well, and have to work to restrain it in order to appear manly. If both genders possess it, and only can artificially move away from it, then it is ridiculous for women alone to be criticized, and may mean that this is not actually a flaw at all.

On a totally different note, I was struck by the Woolf's use of classical reference, given how temporally removed she is from, say, Plato. When Lily "asked him what his father's books were about. 'Subject and object and the nature of reality,' Andrew had said. And when she said Heavens, she had no notion what that meant. 'Think of the kitchen table then,' he told her. 'when you're not there'" (23). The type of intellect that Mr. Ramsay possesses is in a way Platonic: he is concerned with the idea of the table, the epitome of its existence independent of observation. To me, this is a testimony to the pervasiveness of Platonic ideals, and the fact that the definition of what is considered true intellect (which Mr. Ramsay represents is the novel) has changed so little over such a long time.
Woolf also explores the ancient Oedipal complex, with the relationship between Mr. Ramsay, Mrs. Ramsay, and James. James "most of all he hated the twang and twitter of his father's emotion which, vibrating around them, disturbed the perfect simplicity and good sense of his relations with his mother" (37). James views his father as an impediment to a relationship to his mother, and has violent impulses towards him at the very beginning of the novel. This alludes to the story of Oedipus's love affair with his mother, and unintentional murder of his father. The confusion between father and son is further developed when Mr. Ramsay is described as "filled with her words, like a child who drops off satisfied" (38). As James seeks to push his father away from his role as husband, Mr. Ramsay regresses to the role of child. These blurred ideas of familial versus romantic love, and the tension between the role of fathers and sons creates a sense of unsettlement in the Ramsay family, contrasting Lily's idyllic perception of them.

At this point in the novel, I'm still a little confused by the idea and metaphor of the lighthouse itself. I felt that this was an important passage: "she looked at the steady light, the pitiless, the remoreseless, which was so much her, yet so little her, which had her at its beck and call .. . but for all that she thought, watching it with fascination, hypnotised, as if as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight, she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly" (65). Though I'm not completely sure how to interpret this, it seems that the lighthouse might be a metaphor for the two-pronged nature of light, as both a "pitiless and remorseless" entity, and a bringer of "exquisite happiness." The image of "silver fingers," and Mrs. Ramsay's "fascination," as well as the general metaphor of light, cast this force of the lighthouse (whether or not it is also a metaphor for life) as captivating, permeating, and unavoidable.